“You never know how much you need Jesus until Jesus is all you got, because you live day to day, not knowing if you’re going to have your legs or life the next.”
—MICHAEL WILLIAMSON, ARIZONA
Day 51. 306,000 Steps
A week after Thanksgiving, 1st Squad headed north toward sector P8Q. They had a lead on the facilitator who had emplaced the IEDs that killed Buenagua and Peto. When the squad reached the corner of two tree lines, the two-man sniper team dropped off and hid in the underbrush. Abbate was carrying the M40A5 sniper rifle and Laird the standard M4.
“I’ve played peekaboo,” Abbate said, “with this guy on the last two patrols. I know he’s around.”
First Squad pushed on and was crossing into another tree line when LCpl. Juan Palma, who was at point, spotted two sets of clothes folded neatly under a bush. The Marines grinned and settled in to wait. After fifteen minutes, the patrol again pushed on. Abbate and Laird didn’t move from their hide. A few minutes later, a man on a motorcycle putted up a nearby path and signaled to a man with a shovel. The IED would be waiting when the Marines came back.
Sniper conditions were perfect. Laird whispered the range—115 meters. On scope. On target. Fire. The round ripped through the man’s face just below his nose. Instantaneous body collapse. Matt Abbate laughed and punched Jordan Laird in the ribs.
“That,” Matt said, “was for Buenagua and Peto.”
The snipers caught up to the squad at the edge of a field. The Marines hid in the shrubs to see what would happen next. After a few minutes, two farmers ambled along. Through his spotting scope, Laird saw a rifle barrel sticking out of the bottom of a man-dress. When Laird dropped him, the tree line to the front erupted with AK and PKM fire.
First Squad quickly gained fire superiority and maneuvered toward a compound, marked on the photomap as Building 64. The Marines saw the head of a man in his fifties bobbing up and down in the furrows of a field as he crawled away from the compound. They shot him and the firing continued. One man kept sticking out his head at the compound wall.
“I see one turkey necking,” Abbate said, concentrating on his sight picture.
Back at Fires, 3rd Squad strapped on their gear and headed north to help. At company headquarters, Spokes Beardsley called in two F-18s that were flying in a nearby holding pattern.
“We didn’t think we needed air support,” Lantznester said, “but they pushed the birds to us, so we used them.”
Once air was on station, the procedure called for a shake-and-bake mission—one bomb to shake the compound to its foundations, followed by a bomb that burst in the air to scythe down any squirters. It was the forty-third close air support mission for the platoon.
The Marines were lying on line in a flooded, furrowed field, about 200 meters from the compound.
“Heads down!” Laird yelled.
As the lead F-18 swept in to their front, Sibley saw the black puff of an air burst by a rocket-propelled grenade that had a one-in-a-million chance of hitting the jet. The aircraft dropped a 500-pound bomb with a delayed fuse that obliterated a section of the compound wall. Following procedure, there was a pause of thirty seconds. A column of dust now clearly marked the target. The second F-18 rolled in, dropping another 500-pound bomb that exploded in the air, loosing a thousand sizzling shards to scythe down any enemy running out of the rubble.
Abbate was lying prone near Laird. As the F-18 roared in, Laird tried to squeeze his body inside his helmet. He heard a chunk of metal hit the ground and skid by him at sonic speed. He grinned in relief.
“That was close!” he said, turning toward Abbate.
Matt was lying within arm’s length, facedown. It took only a second for Laird to see the blood gushing from his neck. Maybe Matt had raised his head for a fraction of a second to get eyes on the insurgent, or maybe the shard had torn through the ground when his head was down.
Laird pushed Matt over onto his back and ripped out a thick bandage. Other Marines rushed over, fumbling for their bandages. While Laird called for a medevac, the corpsman, Stuart Fuke, pressed gauze deep into the wound.
“Get off me!” Abbate gurgled, flinging Fuke backward.
Blood again spurted out.
“Hold him down!”
Four Marines pinned down Matt’s arms and legs. Fuke grabbed handfuls of gauze and LCpl. Dylan Nordell packed them into his neck.
“I can’t breathe!”
“You couldn’t talk if you couldn’t breathe, bro!”
The Marines held Abbate firmly, keeping pressure on his neck. Laird checked the time. Five minutes had gone by. Where was the rescue bird? Come on, come on.
“This sucks,” Matt muttered. “I can’t believe it. This sucks.”
“You’re gonna be okay,” Laird kept repeating. “We got the bleeding stopped. You’re gonna be okay.”
“It burns,” Matt gurgled, “like fire.”
“A good burn, bro. It’s that stuff in the bandage that stops the bleeding.”
Another glance at the watch. Twenty minutes. Finally, rotors were heard.
Esquibel knew wounds. In the Fallujah battle in 2004, when two fellow snipers lay wounded, he helped to stanch their blood flows. Now the situation was the same.
“When you take him,” he radioed to the inbound pilot, “tell your crewman to keep the compression bandage tight.”
The chopper came in fast, settling in on the far side of the field. The desperate Marines placed Matt on a poleless litter, a piece of canvas with handles, and sloshed over. Halfway across, they slipped, and Matt fell into the mud. The British chopper crew ran up with a pole stretcher and Matt was quickly loaded on board, face-first. Laird and Nordell crawled halfway inside to hold the dressings.
“Get off the bird!” the flight medic yelled, pulling at Nordell.
“Put your fucking hands on the compress!”
The crew was accustomed to grunts trying to stay with their wounded.
“We got him! Back off!”
As the helo lifted off, the crew shifted Matt’s body and the mass of gauze flopped open.
“Hold it tight!” Laird yelled into the thumping noise of the helo blades. “Tight! Tight!”
En route to the hospital, Matt Abbate died on board the helicopter.
The entry in the 3rd Platoon log was brief.
“At 1300, 3rd sqd departed to sector P8Q IOT support ist squad ambushed to the north from bldgs 63, 64 and 65. Airstrike ended enemy threat but also created a friendly casualty. HA 1894.”
Third Platoon had lost the sergeant with the easy grin and wacky expressions. The Marine who helped everyone else, always leading from the front, was gone. Six inches of exposed flesh between Matt’s helmet and his armored plate. One inch of sizzling metal. A hand not pressed tight as the helicopter lurched skyward. Amid battle’s fury, who can judge the cause?
Grunts live with death; they give it and take it. But they don’t cope with death any better than anyone else. When one is killed, his comrades feel numb. Death is a black hole, the absence of explanation.
“It is not the young man who misses the days he does not know,” the Roman general Marcus Aurelius wrote. “It is the living who bear the pain of those missed days.”
The world of an infantryman is unlike any other, and a grunt’s motivation in battle is hard to judge from the outside looking in. The grunt makes instant choices in the heat of battle. He must keep his honor clean even when fighting an enemy who hides among civilians. He must resist the sin of wrath. Abbate had shown the right example.
“When we went out the next day,” Sergeant Deykeroff said, “there was no calling in artillery or anything like that. No revenge. That’s what Matt wanted. Just do your job.”
A few weeks after his death, the sniper platoon attended a remembrance ceremony. The talk wasn’t of the fighting, but of Matt’s weird sayings and oddball antics. He was friendly toward everyone, and the snipers took turns telling funny stories.
The battlefield is a giant craps table. Every crack! on patrol is a white-hot slug of lead breaking the sound barrier as it misses you. Any grunt who is not a fatalist is foolish. Death is as random as it is unexplainable. If you’re very skillful—like Matt—you might tilt the odds a little, but not much.